ChinaTalk

By Jordan SchneiderNews Technology Government Politics

ChinaTalk episodes

October 12 Matt Yglesias + Jerusalem Demsas + Jordan Crossover Pod
I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things.
Check out their show The Argument, it's good.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 8 min
October 08AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race
Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it was cool and could make you trillions. Kevin is launching his own show, Machine Gods, later this October.
We discuss…
Why AGI was built on belief, not just money, GPUs, or talent, and how Google had every piece of the puzzle except the conviction.

What drives Sam, Dario, and Demis, some of the most competitive people alive.

Whether the Manhattan Project analogy holds, and why the government can’t just take the AI over from the scientists who built it.

Why Dario is the most hawkish lab leader on China, and what may have changed during his time at Baidu.

How Washington became the second most AI-pilled city in America, and why politicians fear the machine god for their own power.

Whether people actually hate AI, and what recursive self-improvement in 2027 could mean for everyone else.
Plus: Noam Shazeer’s “divine benevolence,” why Dario can’t lie to save his life, and Lenin singing the outtro music

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 11 min
October 06Data is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military
Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on.
Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a former enlisted Navy sailor, and a veteran of the Army acquisition world, with experience at MITRE and across the Department of Defense. We’re here today to talk about why data is the hard part in making AI work to win wars for you — and what standards, integration processes, and governance you need to turn fun tech and cute little language models into things that can actually serve the warfighter.
We’re also going to talk about the dark side of data — how poisoning can happen, the enemy’s vote in the datasets you build to find things on the battlefield, and what it’s like to be a civil servant trying to make big programs happen inside the acquisition bureaucracy.
Our conversation covers:
Why data is the real bottleneck for military AI, why “AI-ready data” is a myth, and why autonomous tanks are further off than you might think,

Ukraine’s autonomous systems as a case study: how years of collecting, labeling, and learning from battlefield data created the foundation for autonomy,

The boring side of AI: how pipelines, standards, governance, and testing and evaluation determine whether models ever make it into the field,

The adversary’s AI toolbox — including camouflage, deception, electronic warfare, and poisoned data — and how to test against those threats.

The 4D chess game of building programs inside the Pentagon: navigating requirements, funding, acquisition rules, and the people who make or break a program.
Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
43 min
October 05WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian
It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and Project Meridian, a future-of-warfare panel made up of Elon, Palmer, Newt, and Emil Michael.
Is either the right way to transform the force?
Arthur Tellis, Senior Technology Fellow at the Institute for Progress, joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark.
We discuss…
The case against Auto WarCom: Justin's argument that centralizing autonomous weapons would slow down the experiments already running in theaters around the world

Bryan's steelman: a functional command like CYBERCOM or STRATCOM

Who should command the drones?

Terrible branding: Tony on why killer drones have so far escaped the culture war

What happens if Democrats take the House

Why combatant commands make poor engines of transformation

Project Meridian: what the board can do that ONA, CAPE, the Defense Science Board, and the FFRDCs can't; why Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion; Elon's belief that stealth is dead; and who the panel should have included instead

Every base is a target: Operation Spider Web, Europe's low-intensity war with Russia, and why bringing forces home doesn't make them safer
Plus: Newt Gingrich's vital signs, the Pope's AI encyclical, Ben Rich and the Nighthawk, Ghost Fleet, the salmon of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and where everyone would put America's next great military base.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
56 min
October 02Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them
In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and now the 301 tariffs are in court too.
So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues.
Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company importing from about 28 countries, and a plaintiff in both the Section 122 suit (which he won) and the Section 301 challenge, argued before the Court of International Trade the day before we recorded. Guest host Peter Harrell — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law's Institute of International Economic Law, and an attorney — joins Jordan to explain where the litigation goes from here.
We discuss…
From aid worker to spice importer: wild cumin from northeastern Afghanistan, a company started out of a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, and carrying hundred-pound duffel bags of spices through customs

Why a spice tariffs won't protect U.S. industry

Liberation Day changing businesses overnight

Suing the president: an even split of fan mail and hate mail, a pro bono partnership, and why Ethan doesn't understand what everybody else is so scared of

Why the big companies sit on the sidelines: Peter on Fortune 500 firms and major law firms afraid of retaliation, why the lawsuits have come from small businesses and Democratic-led states, and why USTR and CBP have stayed professional anyway

The Section 301 case: a statute used some 130 times for targeted trade disputes, now stretched to 60 jurisdictions covering 99% of U.S. trade; a forced-labor justification that gives China the same 12.5% rate as two-thirds of the world; and why the government will likely keep collecting through 12 to 18 months of appeals

Tariffs after Trump: what a 2028 Democrat would cut and what they'd keep
Plus: why you can't haggle with CBP, Jane Goodall's wild honey, pomegranate molasses made under pressure, paying farmers whatever they ask, and whether Zohran should hire Ethan to run the city's supermarkets.
Listeners can use code CHINATALK at burlapandbarrel.com for a free jar of their choice on a first order over $15.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 6 min
September 29China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright
After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century.
Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back.
Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his new book, Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What It Means for the World.
Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations co-hosts.
We discuss…
The crisis that already happened: why the September 2021 protests in Evergrande's lobby were China's catharsis moment

Decay instead of collapse: why credit growth fell from 18% a year to 5%, why Beijing keeps rolling over loans to zombie state firms, and why in China "the path to crisis is reform"

Jordan and Brad discuss Xi's Perspective: Does supply-chain dominance matter more than GDP?

Twelve million graduates a year, the youth unemployment numbers that vanished in 2023, why all of China's new strategic industries add up to about 6% of GDP, and why a $10,000 BYD doesn't matter if your kid can't get a job

Who's paying for China's AI?
Plus: Logan's case that the US no longer has a systemic economic rivalry with China, and Brad's pushback that Chinese supply-chain controls have so far beaten Western demand-side leverage

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 29 min
September 25WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan.
We discuss…
The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo

The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a shipbuilding binge could hollow out the force

Who replaces Hegseth — the two Mike Rogerses, and why the talent pool for a lame-duck Pentagon is drying up

The AI Force — why a SOCOM-style AI branch cuts against a technology meant to be everywhere, and what a benchmark-setting version could actually do

Manned-unmanned teaming — why putting sailors on robot ships is “asinine,” and what combined arms for robots should look like

Gifts for Beijing — the Anduril drone Iran fished out of the Gulf, dud PrSMs as intelligence windfalls, and why compute still can’t blow anything up on its own

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 13 min
September 22Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!
Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit?

We discuss:
Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has flipped, with things once seen as American concessions to China now treated as concessions from Beijing;

Julian’s framework for a K-shaped US-China relationship, with leader-level diplomacy pulling upward while competition pulls downward;

What Xi’s visit says about the changing political salience of China in the US

Why Beijing’s public statements on AI risk don’t necessarily tell us how it will handle pacing and safety;

What the decline of Xi Jinping could mean for a political system and why China’s next succession could be especially difficult to predict;

China-maxxing from Kissinger to Trump
Plus: The Scholars (儒林外史) and why Qing-dynasty satire about corrupt scholars might make you feel better about America in 2026.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 7 min
September 22Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?
Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services.
We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission.
Our conversation covers:
Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it.

The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster.

Giving the troops the tools and getting out of the way: Why Berntsen thinks the U.S. military’s greatest AI advantage may come from empowering service members to experiment, improvise, and “figure it out.”

Will AI eventually negotiate with AI? We debate whether models can move beyond advising diplomats and executives to actually conducting negotiations.
Plus, cyber challenges, a chat app for government, and book recs.
Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
50 min
September 19WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette
In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.
Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.
We discuss…
Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent

What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed

The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections

The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats

Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan

Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese
Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 18 min

About ChinaTalk

From the publisher's feed

Conversations exploring China, technology, and US-China relations. Guests include a wide range of analysts, policymakers, and academics. Hosted by Jordan Schneider.